Dalhousie Square, or today's BBD Bag, is on the cusp of change. At the heart of old Calcutta established by the British more than 300 years ago, Dalhousie Square is in the throes of modernisation. Like many other areas of greater Calcutta it is being torn apart to lay the new Metro lines that will connect it with Howrah via a tunnel under the Hooghly river, and the exurb, Salt Lake, on its eastern fringes. Consequently, Curzon Park and the area around the tank, Laldighi, opposite Writers' Buildings have been disembowelled. BBD Bag will be transformed forever.
Writers' Buildings is no longer the administrative hub of West Bengal. It is being made over. The exercise began in 2013 and it seems to be unending. The secretariat has moved to Howrah. Currency Building, which was left partially demolished, has of late been restored by the Archaeological Survey of India. A fire has consumed the ornate Strand warehouse. Only the façade remains of the Mackinnon Mackenzie building, once gutted in a blaze. The stone-clad building has sprouted a high-rise office block. BBD Bag is gradually losing its gravitas and ambiance that remained almost unchanged ever since the British raised the panoply of proud buildings around Laldighi.
White & Black: Journey to the centre of Imperial Calcutta put together more than a decade before redevelopment began, remains an authentic document of Dalhousie Square as it was. Its past comes alive in its pages. This brilliant documentary is being presented to a new audience through Christopher Taylor's true-to-life black-and-white frames and Soumitra Das's expansive narrative. One of the last redoubts of imperialist architecture lives on in the pages of this book.
Christopher Taylor is an English photographer, based in France, with the vision of a poet. His black-and-white photographs have an elegiac quality that sensitively capture the misty, grey climes of Iceland, the rarely-noticed details of China's bleak and dreary urbanscape, and the grand colonial buildings of Calcutta. A zoologist by training, this self-taught photographer mostly uses a cumbersome analogue studio camera or an ancient Rolleiflex even in the busiest streets, yet the crowds are often surprisingly absent in his images. He has held critically-acclaimed exhibitions in Paris, London, Beijing. Delhi, Mumbai, and Calcutta. Books include Bombay/Mumbai Immersions, with text by Priya Sarukkai Chabria, also with Niyogi Books. Kehrer Verlag (Germany) has published two books of his photographs: Steinholt from Iceland, and Illuminations.
Soumitra Das is a journalist born and based in Calcutta. He began his career with The Statesman and has retired from The Telegraph. He is deeply involved with the visual arts and heritage issues and writes regularly on these topics. In Photo credit: Rashbehari Das October 2007 he brought out a book on the streets of Calcutta titled A Jaywalker's Guide to Calcutta, which was a bestseller, followed by Calcutta 1940-1970 in the photographs of Jayant Patel in 2018. He has contributed to the Tramjatra book supported by RMIT University in Australia.
Scion of the Van Cleef dynasty, the late Olaf Van Cleef was a counselor in high-range jewellery at Cartier since 1982 till his death in 2018. Olaf, who lived in Paris, was an accomplished artist in his own right and held many exhibitions in Photo credit: Christopher Taylor India. He had published a book titled From Darjeeling to Pondicherry. He is also a designer of gardens. But above all, he was an indefatigable lover of Calcutta, a city he had been visiting since 1990.
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